Starred Reviews has extensively reported the issue of the scraping sites ranking higher in some of its blogs. However, the top contributors and top rankers in the google webmaster forum in acknowledging the existence of the problem itself.

Matt Cutts has finally acknowledged the existence of the issue of the Scraping site ranking higher issue and used twitter to ask for the help from the volunteers to report the “scraping sites ranking higher” issue. The victims are expected to fill in the search term, your original url and the url of the sites that is ranking higher. If you think, any site scraping your content is ranking higher, you may like to report it at google.

The “Scraping sites ranking higher” issue surfaced after the launch of the Google Panda. After the initial shocks, many webmasters who suffered from Google Panda realized that the websites who copied their content were ranking higher – something. The Google’s own webmaster forum was flooded with huge complains about the scraping sites ranking higher.

Mahalo was one of the sites that was demoted by Google Panda. Its traffic continued to plunge spirally downwards. As someone ( potentially a Mahalo executive ?) complained in the Google webmaster forum –

“…. here is a post on their blog which very nicely illustrates how Google has completely screwed up the relevancy in their search results by over-emphasizing AND miscalculating domain authority.”

It is expected that Google will act on this issue sooner than later and we can expect the issue to resolve in a periof of 3 to 6 months. How google is going to balance it with the Panda’s objective of bringing quality sites to the top remains to be seen.

Matt Cutts acknowledgement of the issue vindicates what many sites including starredreviews has been reporting earlier.